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‘Not Enough’ Review: Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There

‘Human rights’ are often invoked to spur the world to intervene. But ‘the world’ truly means the U.S.

By

Adam Kirsch

April 19, 2018 4:48 p.m. ET

The cover of the April issue of Foreign Policy magazine bears the headline “The End of Human Rights?” It is accompanied by the image of a white dove pierced by arrows.

If human rights is dead as a meaningful concept in international politics, there is plenty of blame to go around: As in “Murder on the Orient Express,” the victim had more than one killer. To nationalists, human rights sounds suspiciously like world government; to authoritarians, it represents a potential limit on their power; to populists, it is an imposition...